Scoring systems

Abstract

At the heart of optimal clinical medicine is the ability to prognosticate. Understanding a patient’s likely outcome, and how that outcome might change depending on alternative interventions, is essential if care is to be optimized. Perhaps nowhere is this issue both more important and more difficult than in intensive care. The ICU is home to a wide array of expensive technologies that can both help and harm the critically ill patient; ICU patients often have multiple complex conditions that make prognostication difficult, and decisions must be made rapidly and courageously, as time is of the essence.